Post from elsewhere, forwarded with author's permission.
From: Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase(a)frontiernet.net>
Date: 3 April 2011 14:44
[quote snipped]
Just a little contrarianism on this ...
Should we be worried about the trendline in newer editors (and more on
this below) or the trendline in total edits, which IIRC doesn't seem
to have dipped so much as more established editors are editing more
(this seems to fit with my personal experience)?
As for the "lack of editors that stick", I decided to do some mild
research on this one day. I looked at the English Wikipedia's user
creation logs for a day last summer (always the last day of a month,
for reasons that will become clear below), and then roughly the same
day several years in the past for several years, going all the way
back to 2003 when, by the tone of our current discussions, we
"weren't" having this problem.
I discovered that on those days at least, which I have no reason to
assume were atypical, thousands of accounts were created. And almost
all of them never edited even once. Not last summer. Not years before.
Not in 2003.
Certainly someone else can do more formal research and come up with
actual numbers. But as for me I think it's ridiculous at worst and
premature at best to say that new users are becoming less sticky when,
it seems to me, they have in fact never been particularly sticky.
[quote snipped]
I do think that would help, especially as a generation of users grows
up that's used to a more parallel, less serial online environment as
is found at Facebook and elsewhere. We ought to have:
A live-chat/IM function within MediaWiki, to allow for more efficient
collaboration between users. I see some younger users at meetups and
such editing with a small IRC window open in the corner, interacting
with another editor while they edit. There's no reason it should be so
cumbersome as to require two different programs on two different
servers. (Perhaps at some point in the future this could include
video).
In that vein, with privacy settings that allow for this, an editor
could set things up to allow other users to see what they're editing
as they're editing it.
Going further, I remember the now-abandoned Google Wave being
demonstrated at a conference. When the demonstrator showed how it
could be used so that two people editing the same page at once could
see what the other editor was doing, very loud spontaneous applause
broke out. We need something like that.
We could have other Facebook-inspired social features: in addition to
the current userpage widget which allows you to let others know if
you're logged-in or not, why not some sort of userpage "wall" that
could, when activated, be updated without having to edit the page and
allow some sort of summary of what the editor's working on now, or at
the least a live feed of edits with summaries. (For all I know, maybe
something like this already exists).
Social networking has allowed the online work environment to more
closely mirror the real-world environment of an office, where most
people know at least generally what their coworkers are doing and can
look away from the monitor briefly and talk to them while still
working. While I have no problem with the level of interaction and
collaboration currently available, I'm only speaking for myself, and I
think younger editors weaned on the social-network experience may be
wanting something we can't readily give them. Yet.
Daniel Case
Virgilio:
Your userpage claims you speak American English at an en-4 "near-native level". Want to try again?
-Dan
On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:47 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
> When I misspelled the word intellectual I wasn't referring to certain
> people whose language skills revolve around being spell checkers. It
> is always a thrill to trample on somebody else's language, mostly
> when they can't utter a single word on any other except their own
> language, much less address you in your own language. Misspelling or
> mispronouncing any other language except my own? What, me worry?
>
>
> At 06:14 03-04-2011, you wrote:
>
>> On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:02 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
>>
>>> intelectual
>>
>>
>> *cough*
>>
>> -Dan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> I'm always amazed at the depthness and breadth of knowledge shown on
> these posts. The precision, accuracy of the quantitative data on
> which posts to this listed are based, making it one of the most
> reliable, highly educated and respected fora of the Internet. They
> are a true mirror of the high intelectual level of the discussions
> carried on most Wikimedia projects. They are a source of mutual
> understanding and peaceful coexistence around the world. We should
> all be proud and/or blessed for having such an elite of contributors
> to this list. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Tunisia
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Virgilio A. P. Machado
This is not a meeting of your cell.
Fred Bauder
> At 16:58 02-04-2011, you wrote:
>
>>If everyone in Tunisia had good internet access, knew how to edit a
>> wiki,
>>and had experience doing so that would be a no-brainer. As it is, a
>>mechanism like that disenfranchises 99.999% of the population. Good goal
>>to work for though.
>>
>>Fred
>>_____________________________________________
>>foundation-l mailing list
>>foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>>Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
>
I think you're missing the humor in the "choice" of word misspelled. If you're going to criticize Fred's intelligence, you should take care to ensure that you spell intellectual correctly. Otherwise, it puts quite a damper on your argument. If I was getting heart surgery, I would want my surgeon to know how to spell the body part he is working on. Is it too much to ask that someone making a statement about someone else's intellectual level actually be capable of "intellectual"? Finally, considering I don't have the slightest clue what your primary language is and you seem to use complex English words quite well, your defensiveness about it being a second language is rather perplexing. That being said, I have no interest in taking this further off topic, I just thought the error was funny. Apparently, sarcasm is a one-way street on this list.
-Dan
On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:47 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
> When I misspelled the word intellectual I wasn't referring to certain
> people whose language skills revolve around being spell checkers. It
> is always a thrill to trample on somebody else's language, mostly
> when they can't utter a single word on any other except their own
> language, much less address you in your own language. Misspelling or
> mispronouncing any other language except my own? What, me worry?
>
>
> At 06:14 03-04-2011, you wrote:
>
>> On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:02 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
>>
>>> intelectual
>>
>>
>> *cough*
>>
>> -Dan
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
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-----Original Message-----
From: "Virgilio A. P. Machado" <vam(a)fct.unl.pt>
Sender: foundation-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Sun, 03 Apr 2011 06:47:28
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Wiki-revolution
When I misspelled the word intellectual I wasn't referring to certain
people whose language skills revolve around being spell checkers. It
is always a thrill to trample on somebody else's language, mostly
when they can't utter a single word on any other except their own
language, much less address you in your own language. Misspelling or
mispronouncing any other language except my own? What, me worry?
At 06:14 03-04-2011, you wrote:
>On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:02 AM, Virgilio A. P. Machado wrote:
>
> > intelectual
>
>
>*cough*
>
>-Dan
_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
I'm always amazed at the depthness and breadth of knowledge shown on
these posts. The precision, accuracy of the quantitative data on
which posts to this listed are based, making it one of the most
reliable, highly educated and respected fora of the Internet. They
are a true mirror of the high intelectual level of the discussions
carried on most Wikimedia projects. They are a source of mutual
understanding and peaceful coexistence around the world. We should
all be proud and/or blessed for having such an elite of contributors
to this list. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Tunisia
Sincerely,
Virgilio A. P. Machado
At 16:58 02-04-2011, you wrote:
>If everyone in Tunisia had good internet access, knew how to edit a wiki,
>and had experience doing so that would be a no-brainer. As it is, a
>mechanism like that disenfranchises 99.999% of the population. Good goal
>to work for though.
>
>Fred
>_____________________________________________
>foundation-l mailing list
>foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
In reply to Yaroslav's suggestion about using the interwiki links and
bots to help keep articles maintained and spread new information
across Wikipedia; Yes absolutely that is what the Death anomalies
project does, and now that we've proved that the concept works it is
worth expanding on. Merlissimo has already expanded the bot's report
from the original of "people who are alive according to your project
but dead according to another project" to various other less serious
age related biography anomalies. The technology works, thousands of
articles in dozens of languages have been improved, and it is ready
for rollout to other sorts of maintenance scenarios.
But currently we only have seven projects requesting reports, the
Latin, Slovene, Finnish, Swedish, Gaelic, German and English language
Wikipedias, we extract data from around seventy other language
projects, so if the anomaly is because of an error in say the Italian
Wikipedia then I or someone else might well correct it. But if someone
is dead according to our French article and living according to
articles on the Chinese, Bangla and Afrikaans wikipedias then it
wouldn't currently be picked up as an anomaly as none of those
projects have yet requested a report at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Death_anomalies_table <hint>
On the downside I'm loathe to turn this from an anomaly report to a
bot message to talkpages. Many editors don't have all unicode fonts
installed on their PCs, and the subtle message of "do not use
Wikipedia as a source, treat this as an anomaly where one of the
matched articles may have a reliable source, or may have had an
unsourced change, or may have been vandalised" in my view is safer as
a maintenance report than a bot message.
If you want more info come to Haifa and sit in on
http://wikimania2011.wikimedia.org/wiki/Submissions/cooperation_across_diff…
Also I think it would be cool to have scripts/bots etc that:
Told you if anything on your watchlist had been updated on another project.
Listed articles without picture on your project that had interwiki
links to articles with pictures on other projects.
Changed the colour display of interwiki links when you looked at an
article if one of the other language versions of an article had more
recent info, more info, images or just on some fancy algorythm was
probably better than the language version you were looking at.
especially if in your user preferences you could choose which other
languages you were interested in.
But all those things would take some investment in writing. It took
the Slovene wikipedia just a few days from requesting a death anomaly
report to receiving and clearing it.
WereSpielChequers
> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:03:56 +0400
> From: "Yaroslav M. Blanter" <putevod(a)mccme.ru>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] interwiki links
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID: <eab5e06ae02af915db22c07648b71ed2(a)mccme.ru>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
>
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:02:22 +0200, "Amir E. Aharoni"
> <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
>> 2011/3/23 WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>:
>>> But how would this process handle situations such as the EN wiki
>>> article [[David Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley]] having an interwiki
>>> link to the DE article on his late mother? Currently this comes up as
>>> a death anomaly because one is living but the other deceased. Would
>>> the central repository handle such linking by showing such links as
>>> redirected, or would we continue to have such anomalies? Or would DE
>>> wiki consider it an error to link these two articles?
>>
>> It should be an error to link those two articles, but in reality links
>> to a section in another language are quite common.
>>
>> I don't really have a clever solution up my sleeve, but putting the
>> links in one place will likely make these situations easier to handle
>> but allowing the editors to focus on content and ontology, without
>> worrying about updating a long list of links in a lot of projects (and
>> no, bots don't always help).
>>
>
> Actually, this is not an answer, more like a question, which may be well
> related to the issue. May be it has been discussed earlier but I am not
> aware of such discussions.
>
> We have a number of standard types of renewing information. These are for
> instance (the list is by far not complete)
>
> * deaths (I guess this is why this Deathnote project started);
> * elections and government changes at all levels;
> * changes in administrative divisions (for instance here in NL they split
> and merge communities several times per year);
> * sporting and other records changing: for instance A was a record holder
> but then lost her record to B.
>
> Now obviously not all of these changes get reflected in all language
> editions immediately. Obviously one can be sure that when a new US
> president gets elected or a new chess world champion wins the title, this
> information gets spread over all articles on a scale of hours, sometimes
> minutes. I am less sure about the elections of the mayor of Recife or
> splitting a third level administrative unit in Inner Mongolia into three.
> On the other hand, Portuguese Wikipedia is likely to have an up-to-date
> info about the mayor of Recife whereas Chinese of Mongolian ones would
> record the administrative change in Inner Mongolia. Then it can take months
> or even years to make to other Wikipedias. Is there any way we can automate
> this? For instance, having a central data bank for this type of changes and
> sending bot messages into talk pages of relevant articles in all languages?
>
> Cheers
> Yaroslav
>